Curtis Yarvin, Still Wrapped Up in Monarchist Fantasies

The NY Times interviews Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, who thinks democracy has "failed." 

He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted, and perhaps most provocative, he argues that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a “monarchy” run by what he has called a “C.E.O.” — basically his friendlier term for a dictator.

He sees his role as "demystifying," by which he means that most people have an irrational reverence for democracy that they would shed if they thought harder. He defends his view like this:

It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of “Is democracy good or bad?” is, I think, a secondary question to “Is it what we actually have?” When you say to a New York Times reader, “Democracy is bad,” they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them, “Politics is bad” or even “Populism is bad,” they’re like, Of course, these are horrible things. So when you want to say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government, and then you’ll be like, Yes, of course, actually policy and laws should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.

No, you're not. I was going to write a response, but I discovered that "Hadur," a commenter on Marginal Revolution, already did it for me:

I was democracy-pilled by reading biographies of Franco and Salazar. The Iberian countries in the 1930's were what every right-wing authoritarian fantasizes about: vigorous young conservative dictators firmly in charge of a country, liberals totally defeated and out of power. Both were able to stay in power for decades.

The result? For a while they owned the libs but eventually their countries just stagnated. Badly. To stay in power, Franco and Salazar had to systematically defang any organization that could in theory threaten their rule. Yes this meant left-wing universities and pro-democracy groups, but it also meant the church, the military, etc. Salazar in particular tried to strip these of power and resources so they could never threaten his rule. A damning incident in the Franco biography was that near the end of Franco's rule his Prime Minister was assassinated by Basques and Franco couldn't find a replacement for him. A country of tens of millions of people and nobody qualified to be PM. That's what decades of suppressing the production of new elites does. To a dictator, any young ambitious person is a potential threat and must not be allowed to blossom too much.

Democracy has many flaws but having rival teams of elites is something you don't appreciate until you lose it.

It's the "rival teams of elites" that Yarvin misses. I agree that populist democracy, which I would define as the belief that elites have no special knowledge and "expertise" is a pretext for taking power from the people, is a disaster. But that is not what we have; our system has a huge role for elites and experts. 

Yarvin calls himself a "historian," but as I already complained on this blog he knows nothing about history. He grabs the odd fact or statement, cites them entirely out of context, and then pretends to have done history. He might have noticed that all his questions about democracy vs. elite rule were fought over throughout the 1700s and 1800s by people who did not have any kind of special reverence for democracy. Including the founders of the American Republic; I suggest the Federalist Papers as a good place to start reading some serious discussion of how to set up a government that respects both popular will and elite expertise. But there were similar debates in Britain and France at least, and I assume other European countries. These are hard problems. But so far as I can see, Yarvin has nothing to say about them.

Here is the question I would ask Yarvin: "Can you name a dictatorship where life is better than in the US or the European democracies?"

I can't. I certainly don't think that representative democracy in either the Parliamentary or Presidential form is always the best system for everyone. In some parts of the world it has failed disastrously. Some Asian countries, such as Singapore and post-WW II Japan, got good results using a one-party pseudo-democracy. But on the whole the record of modern democracy is just far better than anything else, and only a deluded fool could believe otherwise.